"Mom?"
"I'm in the dining room. Is your father with you?"
"No." Sterling peered over the saloon doors, saw she had photographs spread on the table. He pushed through, holding one door for Paige.
"I'm making up a history of your father's contribution to the community. I found these of our twenty-fifth anniversary. Remember that party? I'm thinking we should have another. Forty isn't the milestone fifty would be, but it would give us an opportunity to invite- Oh." She lifted her head and saw Paige.
Paige hung back, biting her lip.
Sterling didn't want to see that this was hard for her. He looked back at his mother. She didn't greet Paige, only lifted her plucked brows in cool inquiry.
"We were wondering about this, Mom."
She glanced at the ring dangling off the chain and stiffened with recognition.
After a moment, she went back to shuffling photographs. Her hand shook. "It looks like Grady Fogarty's."
"Did you know it has your initials inside it?"
Silence.
"Because if you have a connection to Grady- Do you?"
"It's none of your business, Sterling. It is absolutely no one's business." Least of all hers, she seemed to say with a cutting glance toward Paige.
Paige slid a step along the wall, was stopped by the cherrywood plant stand.
"You gave it to him, didn't you? When?" He dropped the ring into the middle of the photographs showing their happy family moments. All those high morals of hers, the ones she'd always demanded he subscribe to, were as flawed as those photographs, faded and unfocused and showing tattered corners. "How long did it go on? When did it end?"
She let out an impatient breath and her chin went up. "This isn't anything that needs to be discussed, Sterling."
"Did you search Dad's office?" Paige asked.
"I don't have to answer to you."
"No, you don't," Sterling said with a back-off look at Paige. "But the police are going to want to know. Did you break into Grady's house? His car?"
His mother narrowed her eyes a fraction as she looked between them. Setting three photos to the side, she said, "I had a quick peek for the ring, yes. Took your father's keys and let myself into Grady's office. I thought there might be-" She cut herself off, dragged a photo by the corner from beneath the ring. "Your father and I don't agree on certain things, except that we'd rather keep our private lives private. Kindly don't tell him you're aware of...this." She nodded at the ring. "He'll never come home."
"You expect him to want to?" Sterling pushed his hands into his pockets.
"He always did before." She brought her head up, a tiny pucker between her brows. "Did he say he wouldn't?" With a distracted glance around, she located her handbag and dug into it. "No, he'll come. He just needs a few days." Bringing up a gold case, she shook out a cigarette.
"You smoke?!" Where the hell was his mother? Who was this woman?
Her hand continued to shake as she held the cigarette between two fingers and moved to the fireplace for a match. "Not usually in the house." She lit it and drew on the cancer-stick like it was saving her life.
"I don't believe this," he breathed.
Of course his father knew, had always known. That's what the lake trips were about. The, I'm not enough anguish. Ah, Dad.
Paige shifted and her sweater whispered against his mother's faux marble wall. His mother was right about one thing: this wasn't her business. If Paige only knew what his father had been through because of hers, she'd have the grace to leave.
As he glared at her, the little emotion that had been in Paige's expression-sadness, regret, apology, he wasn't sure-became hidden by a tense, neutral poker-face. She went from looking at him to looking through him.
He jerked his gaze away, ignored the tearing sensation in his chest, and watched his mother blow out a stream of smoke, touch a fingertip to the end of her tongue. Something like smugness teased the edges of her mouth.
It pleased her that this was driving a wedge between him and Paige. He had the feeling of a train derailing beneath him.
"You were the reason my mom left," Paige said. "And Olinda."
"He was a sexual predator, Paige. Don't make out like it was her fault. It couldn't have happened more than once, and probably a long time ago, right, Mom?"
Paige's mouth curved with cynicism. "I have a hard time seeing your mother as a victim. Were you, Mrs. Roy?"
Something tragic flashed in his mother's expression before she bent to tap her ash into a potted fern. "The victims were the women he flaunted, thinking to make me leave my husband for him."
"Because he loved you, wanted a life with you? And you didn't feel the same? You bought him that ring," Paige said.
"That was early days. I idealized the situation." His mother's mouth firmed into a line. "I told him not to wear it. He did it to spite me. I wasn't about to leave my husband for him, though. It took me twenty-two years to leave that neighborhood." She drew on her cigarette. "And take my son into a house with you in it? What an appalling mistake that would have been."
His mother's contempt seemed to drain the last of the color beneath Paige's pale skin. Chin up, jacketless and damp, all cheekbones and bony shoulders, Paige absorbed the derision with a tiny swallow.
Don't, Sterling wanted to say to his mother, and felt the tearing sensation again, like peeling wallpaper strips, starting in his gut, ripping all the way up through his chest, leaving the back of his throat raw.
"So. Are you finished stirring up trouble?" his mother asked Paige.
Jesus, the trouble this could cause. Poor Dad.
"We don't need to say anything to anyone about this. You can see that, right?" he said to Paige.
"Right. We can just keep pointing fingers at Lyle. He was fixing your car, wasn't he? That's why he bought the parts on the company account."
Sterling took one staggering step as the implication that this thing had been on and off for years hit him.
"Lyle won't say anything." His mother pressed her cigarette butt into the fern.
Paige snorted and drew her arms tighter around herself. "I guess his career has always depended on his keeping his mouth shut, hasn't it?"
"So does yours," his mother said.
Paige cocked her head, arrested. "What do you mean?"
"Your tuition? Your father never had that kind of money. I gave it to him. I expected Sterling to come home and wanted you out of town. Then you stayed away," she said, frowning at her son.
"Dad got a loan from the bank," Paige said.
"No, he gave me a promissory note with his share of the factory as collateral. That's what I didn't want her to find," she said to Sterling. "Your father doesn't want me to collect on it because Grady threatened to tell the whole town how I came to have it." She turned back to Paige with a cold look in her eye. "But Grady is thirteen years overdue paying off that note. Walter wanted to go through the motions of letting you audit and cash out, to hide that." She waved at the ring. "But I can't see why we should have to. Especially if all of this will come out anyway."
Paige, usually so vibrant, paled to deathly gray. She looked once at Sterling. It was a shattered, blaming glance that congealed his blood. She pushed off the wall and through the saloon doors.
One sprang back, smacking against the wall.
Sterling flinched, not just because his mother hated when people did that to the doors, but because he'd just seen something die in Paige. He very much feared it had been whatever she might have felt for him.
~ * ~
Martyrs knew something she didn't. Taking the high road sucked, Paige decided, as she staggered into her driveway, feet so cold they'd stopped aching, chin rattling, shoulders stiff from hunching in a brace against the gusting wind and steady rain.
Seriously, no one appreciated these gestures. Just like no one gave a damn what she did in her efforts to ensure her family was looked after. Wasted energy is what it all had been.
A yank of alarm tugged in her chest when she saw Sterling beneath the overhang of her father's house. She'd hiked across Sanderson's cow field to ditch him and his ‘get into the truck' commands, but apparently he wasn't through stalking her.
"You look like hell."
She flinched at the grating tone in his voice. "I don't want to talk to you."
He watched her take the long route around a rain-spotted puddle, keeping distance between them.
When Lyle came out the front door before she got to it, she faltered.
So did he. He had mottled bruises, a fat lip, and a duffle hooked over his shoulder. He was a model of resentment and escape. He didn't say anything.
See? No one cared.
Lyle carried on to the driver's side of his truck where he threw the duffle across to the passenger seat. He paid zero notice of Sterling.